Psychotherapy and EMDR

Psychotherapy offers space to explore the thoughts and feelings of a client.

The psychotherapist works to think and feel alongside the client, and to focus in on the conscious and unconscious beliefs, thoughts and feelings driving certain behaviours and moods.

Often clients come in to psychotherapy with some mixture of anxiety, depression, difficulties in relationships, a confused sense of self, addictions, or distress around loss. Sometimes a client might have a defined sense of what is difficult and sometimes the sense of distress is more vague; a sense of something being ‘off’ and the experience of living spontaneously feeling unavailable.

Integrative psychotherapy is wide-ranging, drawing from different bodies of thought including psychodynamic and attachment theory (which emphasises the experience of childhood and our family of origin), existential and humanistic thought (which emphasises the present experience and the challenges that we all face as humans), and systemic thought (which emphasises the wider cultural and societal influences which play a role in our lives).

Integrative psychotherapy allows the psychotherapist to draw on whatever tools or thinking feel most useful for the client.

The transpersonal school of psychotherapy holds that there is a spiritual dimension to existence, and offers questions about a relationship with this aspect of our human experience.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is a particular set of tools, and way of working, which focuses more specifically on treating clients in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. These experiences might constitute complex trauma (the thousand small knocks) or big T traumas (the significant events which are experienced as still threatening).